


at the foot of my bed (I can lay down next to you)

by flynnwb



Series: relief next to me [4]
Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Content Warning: Ianthe Tridentarius, F/F, Harrow eventually finds the clit and the clit is a two-hander, Manipulation, Masturbation, Pining, Post-Harrow the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Sexual Repression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-16 18:00:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28710867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flynnwb/pseuds/flynnwb
Summary: At first, she had slept.  She’s not even sure how long it lasted; how can one mark time in the white blank bliss of oblivion?  But then, the dreams had begun.  Just snippets, initially.  An alien ship, familiar faces;  Ianthe’s disdainful washed-out loveliness, the dark, unassuming features of the Emperor Undying, the violently unwelcome Ortus- no, Gideon the First.And yet, Gideon’s (herGriddle, not that desiccatedass) roguish, lopsided grin is excruciatingly absent.  Lucid dreaming is clearly a pernicious fiction, because Harrow can’t manage even for one brief instant to relive the certainty of those strong arms eclipsing her like gravity in the weightlessness of dense saltwater.  In rare moments of clarity she finds herself wishing that, if the dreams weren’t to be of Gideon, they might cease entirely and leave her to rest in tranquil nothingness.They do not.-------Currently updating so this can be read in tandem with the last several chapters ofI will call you pretty darlin’: please follow posting dates OR read this after completing previous installment.
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Ianthe Tridentarius, Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius, The Body | Alecto | The Girl in the Tomb/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Series: relief next to me [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2052774
Comments: 15
Kudos: 46





	1. hey my love, buried you a month or two ago

**Author's Note:**

> **all my user subs got lost somehow, so if you subscribed to me before maybe try re-upping**
> 
> Dysfunctional lesbian love triangle fics: so addictive, I can never write _just_ three.
> 
> Title from the song **Talia** , by King Princess  
>  _But four drinks I'm wasted  
>  I can see you dancing, I can lay down next to you  
> At the foot of my bed  
> If I drink enough  
> I can taste your lipstick, I can lay down next to you  
> But it's all in my head  
> If I drink enough I swear that I will wake up next to you_

At first, she had slept. Rested, really. She had been so excruciatingly weary when she arrived here, barely able to stand beneath the suffocating weight of a cataclysmic adrenaline crash after eons (nine months) of constant dreadful vigilance. It was hardly a conscious choice, but she had had no objections. What else was she going to do?

She’s not even sure how long it lasted; how can one mark time in the white blank bliss of oblivion? But then, at some indeterminate point...the dreams had begun. Snippets at first. A foreign ship, all plain burnished metal curves and angles and not a single decorative skull or comforting inlay of bone to ground herself with. And, incongruous in the alien environment, familiar faces. Ianthe’s disdainful washed-out loveliness, the dark, unassuming features of the Emperor Undying gently twisting into a thoughtful frown, the violently unwelcome Ortus the - no, not Ortus, **Gideon** the First.

Making that correction still stings. Of all the faces Harrow has hoped she might dream about to pass her lonely eternity in this frozen mausoleum, Gideon’s (not that desiccated **ass** , no, _her_ Griddle) has always been first on the list. Before, even, the Body of the Locked Tomb. Harrow acknowledges that this is potentially a massive paradigm shift but she is finding it in herself not to resist. There’s nothing quite like death to make one reassess one’s presuppositions and prejudices.

Yet, even with all her acceptance, her admission of her own bitter, selfish hunger to have those golden eyes fix their intoxicating warmth on her just one more time, as she sleeps she can’t seem to catch a single glimpse of that roguish, lopsided grin. Lucid dreaming is clearly a pernicious fiction, because she can’t manage for even one brief instant to relive the certainty of those strong arms eclipsing her like gravity in the weightlessness of dense saltwater.

Perhaps it’s what she deserves, to lose even the fantasy of Griddle. It’s payment for running away, for cruelly abscising her cavalier all those months ago, for very nearly wasting so vivid a soul as Gideon’s. If this is her punishment, Harrow will gladly take it. She always has gone in for (perhaps overcommitted to) self-flagellation. But as she floats in and out of her own dreamed existence, in rare moments of clarity she finds herself wishing that, if the dreams weren’t to be of Gideon, they might cease entirely and leave her in tranquil nothingness.

They do not.

The first time she dreams Ianthe beneath her, run through on Harrow’s rapier, she thinks the most impossible thing about the scene is her having beaten Ianthe in a swordfight. But then the dream progresses. Tridentarius is wearing a bloody shirt and a smug smile as she draws Harrow’s face in and presses their mouths- Well, she has immediately had enough of _that_. That first time, Harrow sits straight up on the bier in the mausoleum of the Locked Tomb for possibly the first time in weeks- Months? Years?- only to roughly slam her vulnerable diaphragm into the end of the massive broadsword she had fallen asleep clasping to her chest. She wheezes deep breaths of that freezing air, and shifts the sword to her side. The fug of long sleep clings to her consciousness the way the residue of oil-white paint on dark cloth lingers even after the most thorough of launderings.

There is a fuzzy half-light to this grey space, the aggregate glow of thousands of luminous worms in the cavern ceiling outside creeping in around the stone pillars that make up the mausoleum of what is now Harrow’s eternal resting place. Harrow wraps her arms around herself and tries very resolutely not to think of how Ianthe’s lips had felt - she’d barely gotten to it in the dream, anyway. But she _already knows_ , doesn’t she, thanks to Harrow the First, back on the Erebos, making the only play the poor addled fool could think of. 

Harrow hadn’t intended her insurance measures on Ianthe’s vows to lead her lobotomized self to such a...crude interaction. It must have been confusing for Ianthe, to think Harrow would do such base things with her, but. Well. Harrow turns the moment over in her mind’s eye, examining both the actions, and the nauseating sense-memory of Harrow the First, as clinically as she can. Perhaps there had been a brief instant during which the novel sensations had been...not-repellent.

This entire mental exercise is exhausting, though. It is a relief to realize she will never again have to confront the aching, hungry ambivalence that makes her want to shrivel in on herself when another person touches her in anything other than violence. 

In life, she hadn’t ever had the time to figure out what the hell to _do_ about it. Even Ortus’ remorseful embrace had been both years too long and gone far too soon. Afterward, she had found herself longing for one more minute of those heavy, cumbersome arms interceding protectively between her and the rest of the universe, longing for God’s hand on hers as he tells her he might have liked to have her as a daughter. Longing for a snoring unconscious Ianthe, rolling over to Harrow’s side of that wide bed and automatically folding warm heavy limbs around Harrow at odd angles, an upper arm across her forehead, a leg thrown over Harrow’s knees at exactly the most uncomfortable fulcrum. Ianthe always arranged herself as if her body had long practice sleeping pressed against some other, taller companion.

Harrow feels a bitter craving for these situations and yet knows that she would inevitably hate them when actually confronted, would freeze, incapable of either rebuffing or engaging. So it’s a relief to be here, alone, knowing she won’t ever be blindsided by unexpected physical proximity again. 

The only person whose contact she is accustomed to - who has been touching her for most of her life- is Gideon. And that’s the only touch she knows how to receive. At first, she would allow it exclusively in the bloody, electrifying violence of their brawls. But then, back at Canaan House, sometime before… it... happened, she had acquired the habit of considering how she might react to other flavors, how her sharp edges might soften under the heat of tawny skin and warm muscle. Harrow had begun to fantasize not just about Gideon’s embrace, but Gideon’s hands on her, in her hair, on her face, on her hips...

Harrow groans. There’s no point pursuing this line of thinking. Acknowledging that she misses Gideon like a limb, like her very heart; fine. Acknowledging that this wretched emotion might surpass what she has felt for the Body...fine? But Harrow is a bone adept above all, and to bring the flesh into it...it’s far too late to destabilize the foundations of her self-concept like this. Not _now_ , not when it won’t change anything.

She lies back down, this time with the sword beside instead of atop her (just in case she needs to make another quick escape from some explicit spectre of intimacy who invades her dreams), and goes back to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You thought Crux loved lists? Just wait until you read **my** gratuitous chains of modifiers. Also, goddamnit Harrow, it’s called a pommel, not an end, like, get with the program already.
> 
> Drop me a comment if ur goth and sad lmao~


	2. but it's like you're still standing on my floor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > As a child she had certainly never even conceived of the possibility that the afterlife might include ‘yearning for corporeality’. And the near-daily fantasies younger-Harrowhark had spun surrounding her own death had been _exceedingly_ detailed. Harrow supposes that her subconscious is just using dreams to hammer home this fundamental principle; the true value of something is only appreciable through its absence. As if she doesn’t already know.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Currently updating so this can be read in tandem with the last several chapters of I will call you pretty darlin’: you can follow posting dates OR read this after completing previous installment, OR read this standalone. Technically you can do whatever you want and I can’t stop you, it’s the internet.

She cannot stop the dreams. They keep coming, bombarding her, always that same strange ship, all burnished metal and foreign symbols and not a bone in sight. She dreams her own hands on different weapons, oiling the blade of Griddle’s broadsword - where had her protective bone ash coating gone? Of all her sleeping psyche’s wild inventions, the tiniest mundane changes disturb her equilibrium most of all; why would she dream in such excruciatingly tedious detail about maintaining a pointless edge on Gideon’s blade, of all things? After all, she would never risk taking it into battle - both due to the weapon’s safety being the sine qua non of the entire past year’s enterprise...and on the practical side of things, well, she can’t deny her own lack of wrist strength. But there are more unsettling types of dreams than these.

Often she drifts off and finds herself staring at a spartan-plain floor or wall or ceiling, sweat-dampened cloth catching irritatingly against her skin as she repeats the same effortful sequence of movements over and over. These sorts of dreams are always accompanied by a foreign burn between her scapulae, in her abdomen, hamstrings, in her forearms, her lungs even...

It is terribly uncomfortable to be made so obtrusively _aware_ of one’s inescapable _meat_. And yet when she wakes, Harrow often clings to that same loathsome feeling she had so fervently eschewed in her eighteen years of life. In her conscious minutes, senses dulled by the numbing cold of the mausoleum, she will find herself actually wishing that hum of electricity might return to linger painfully in her muscles, to map each centimetre of her sore body, to pull her out of her own mind. Not enough to stoop to something so embarrassing as attempting press-ups and star jumps. Although there is that open stretch of chill, slightly-less-uneven cavern floor between the moat and mausoleum... but no, especially not with the glow worms there to witness her embarrassment. Still.

As a child she had certainly never even conceived of the possibility that the afterlife might include ‘yearning for corporeality’. And the near-daily fantasies younger-Harrowhark had spun surrounding her own death had been _exceedingly_ detailed. Harrow supposes that her subconscious is just using dreams to hammer home this fundamental principle; the true value of something is only appreciable through its absence. As if she doesn’t already know.

How many years with Griddle **right there** within her grasp and she had never just reached out, not in any way except violence. What a damned fool she was. A fool, and a coward.

If she could go back, command her younger self to interrogate that white-hot rage that had seared her belly and lungs, intensifying each time Griddle attempted to leave Drearburgh...each time Griddle attempted _to leave Harrowhark_ , what might happen then? If she dragged the terrifying truth - that she cannot countenance a life without Gideon - into the light sooner, before Canaan house, before that stupid godawful fence railing, would things be different?

Would she have been kinder? Might she have welcomed eleven year-old Griddle’s tentative comfort instead of biting and snapping at the slightest hint of an olive branch in Nav’s hand? She hopes so. God, she hopes that in some parallel dimension, some strange versions of herself and Griddle might actually be happy. Because for all their horror, those last few dreadful days at Canaan house are simultaneously some of the lightest in Harrow’s conscious memory.

Nav had seemed to blossom as well. Despite her protestations against Harrow ‘ _ever_ talking like that again’, she’d glowed with pride when Harrow admitted to needing her, valuing her skill. She has always been so easy to read. How might Griddle have reacted if Harrow had ever managed to squeeze a description of what she really felt out past her own clenched teeth?

It doesn’t matter now, though. She keeps having to remind herself of this, during her little walks.

In the moments when she surfaces from dreaming and cannot bear the thought of going back to that strange simulacrum of life, she has taken to wandering the cavern that envelops the mausoleum. Harrow still does not know how long it has been in total, tries to convince herself that it doesn’t matter, that she should be releasing her hold on linear time. But instead she finds herself using a jagged-chipped hunk of stone to scratch deep tally marks each time she wakes, into a column of the mausoleum. Harrow rationalizes that embracing the dissolution of the things that anchor a human mind too soon would be ruling out the (extraordinarily unlikely) possibility that Gideon might somehow encounter Camilla and Sextus, and furthermore that the Master Warden might be capable of _yet another_ insane miracle in which her and Gideon’s souls could co-exist - 

Harrow has to cut off that line of thinking. Like many other lines of thinking. She is tallying her wake-sleep cycles only because she has nothing better to do. The fantasy of a win-win scenario is frivolous and trite, and she needs to let go. No one is coming and that is good. The likelihood of someone (other than Griddle?) having the motivation to search is abysmal, thankfully. A few living people might have the skill (although for all she knows Ianthe and Mercy and Augustine and Ortu-Gideon the First could all be getting cheerfully digested by heralds right now). Harrow comforts herself with the reminder that the precautions and misdirections she’d implemented initially in those first few days after Canaan house had not failed once during her entire time on the Mithraeum, surrounded by the most powerful necromancers in the known universe and _literally_ **God**. They will still function, should Gideon somehow manage to strong arm someone into looking for Harrow. Botched lyctorhood aside, Harrow _is_...was? the best necromancer of her generation, and she had taken great pains to disguise the key to this place. She’s here to stay.

So she hopes her years of cruelty have at least made it easier for Griddle to move on, to let Harrow go in just the way Harrow could never release her. Selfishly, she wants Gideon to think of her, but realistically that would only mean more suffering and Nav has suffered enough already. 

Harrow hopes the cavalier has come to terms with wearing Harrow’s scrawny, ungainly body, hopes Nav is off doing gross annoying Nav things. Like walking on her hands, and salivating over statuesque women. Maybe even real ones, outside the pages of a magazine. Perhaps reciprocated. Griddle deserves to experience the fullness of human life. Harrow has to swallow down the pang of envy that overwhelms her every time she thinks about that, though. And because she has nothing to do but sit here with her thoughts, she’s examined the feeling enough now to admit that it’s _not_ envy over Gideon’s occupancy of Harrow’s own body.

Hell, Harrow had _intended_ the cavalier to use her body. Ah, she thinks to herself, not in the way that phrasing implies, although Harrow has to admit that the mental image of Gideon taking her pleasure in Harrow’s-

No. This train of thought is _exactly_ why Nav’s cursed magazine is in a corner across the moat, buried under a pile of rough mineral chunks Harrow had chipped from stalagmites. She had thrown the thing into the water, the first time she had come to her senses with it open in her hands. Of course she’d immediately panicked and fished it back out - she couldn’t dispose of something that had been so precious to Griddle. The natural conclusion: burial beneath rocks that Harrow swore to herself would remain unturned. After all, hadn’t Harrowhark Nonagesimus, more than anyone, learned her lesson about rolling stones away from graves?

Despite her best efforts, however, Harrow’s mind inevitably seems to wander in that same vulgar direction, given enough time at loose ends. So Harrow’s developed a system of double avoidance; when she wakes from a dream that’s too much, she will stay conscious only up to the point when her self-recriminations and aimless circles of logic fail to distract her any longer. When her mind starts wandering...downward, Harrow will go back to sleep. It’s a solution. Of a sort.

It’s back to the uncertain mercy of her unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Harrow is such a melodramatic Shakespearean-style lover, Jesus CHRIST. Bet she would unironically listen to _Grenade_ by Bruno Mars.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> > It’s not that she’s interested in _this_ magazine. It’s that Harrow’s entire life has consisted of reading - ancient desiccated tomes of necromantic wisdom, prayers to the Tomb, inventories and bookkeeping for the daily functioning of Drearburgh, the writings of contemporary necromantic researchers. And in the few moments she could actually bear it, her parents’ journals.
>> 
>> There is nothing to read inside the Locked Tomb. So here she sits in absolute existential anguish, unable to go back to sleep, excruciatingly bored of devising untestable necromantic theorems in her mind, and bereft of any alternative occupation ... with Nav’s titty magazine open in her lap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content note: Harrow/the body of the locked tomb

It’s not that she’s interested in _this_ magazine. It’s that Harrow’s entire life has consisted of reading - ancient desiccated tomes of necromantic wisdom, prayers to the Tomb, inventories and bookkeeping for the daily functioning of Drearburgh. The writings of contemporary researchers on those fortuitous occasions when supply deliveries included new academic periodicals along with the blue magazines Gideon confoundingly managed to sneak into every requisition order. And in the few moments she could actually bear it, her parents’ journals.

There is nothing here to read. She can’t even really write something and read it back to herself, although by this point she has managed to refine her note taking, elevating it from ‘tally marks scratched into a prison wall’ to ‘simplified glyphs on an ancient stone tablet’. Last week (Or yesterday? Or a month ago? The last time she’d been awake.) she had etched a novel theorem into one of the empty mausoleum columns in her new brutalist shorthand. She’s even taken to writing things out in longhand, using her blood as ink, although this can only stretch so far before needing time to regenerate. It seems that in this bubble she is bound by the remembered rules of her pre-lyctoral necromancy, making her reserves of power vexingly limited. For a writing medium to support her gory script, she employs a convenient flat slab of light-coloured stone which rests low on the slope down from mausoleum to surrounding moat. The rock’s placement beside the icy water makes the surface exceedingly convenient to wash and reuse.

Still, the single tablet with her finite supply of blood is to _actual books_ as a single tooth would be to the assembled might of every skeletal construct in Drearburgh. Harrow wishes at the very least that her own letters might have come with her. Then she’d have flimsy to handle, pre-existing writing to peruse, but no - the pathetic version of her who first entered the River hadn’t known the letters’ contents. Just one among many ways that Harrowhark the First had been woefully unprepared for indefinite solitary confinement.

So here she sits in absolute existential anguish, unable to go back to sleep, excruciatingly bored of devising untestable necromantic theorems in her mind, and bereft of any alternative occupation ... with Nav’s titty magazine open in her lap.

There are, shockingly, three actual text articles in the thing. Harrow has two of them down by heart. The first is an intimately in-depth look at the cover model’s preferred fitness routine. The phrase “body sculpting,” which sounds entirely too flesh-magicy for Harrow’s tastes, appears a gratuitous total of six times. Before this magazine, Harrow had firmly believed she knew absolutely everything about collagen. She had been scandalized to discover that in all her extensive necromantic training not a single soul had mentioned its utility as a _pre-workout supplement_. 

Although the delivery mechanism (the archetypal thought-form of a racy periodical) is bizarre, it cannot be denied that **Nav** has genuinely managed to teach **Harrow** something for once. Of course, she has no plans to ever reveal this single uncharacteristic oversight to Griddle. If she ever lets it slip, she will _never_ hear the end of it - … well, Harrow supposes she should feel grateful that she’ll never get the opportunity. It should be a relief to eschew the hassle of Nav’s buffoonish teasing. At least this is what she tells herself.

The second article is an interview with the painter responsible for four of the magazine’s most deplorably garish illustrations. Harrow has analyzed every element of his responses and still finds the man just as **insufferable** on each fresh re-read as she did the first time through. 

This article is Harrow’s favorite, by simple metric of how much sheer emotion it evokes in her. Many hours have been pleasantly spent crafting in her head the perfect barrage of remarks to utterly annihilate the conceited painter’s entire self-concept. If Harrow were to ever get a shot at him, she’d put a permanent stop to his falsely-humble insinuations about all the humanitarian accolades he deserves for “elevating the collective consciousness” through erotica. In particular she would make him eat the statement that close-up paintings of breasts “capture the model’s soul by purposefully rejecting the vanity of face-centric portraiture”. Sometimes Harrow wonders if it wouldn’t be worth coming back from the dead just to give the piece of human refuse the tongue lashing he deserves.

On the topic of...tongue lashings, the third article- well. The third article Harrow is having some struggles with. Harrowhark Nonagesimus will not allow herself to _fear_ anything anymore. She is a formidable force by nature - this is not in doubt. Harrow has seen enough during her short existence to break a lesser mind. But she still hasn’t managed to read this simple how-to article through to the end even once. She had thought the painter’s insufferable conceit was nauseating enough, but the final article has been nearly impossible for her to stomach. 

So here she is again, preparing to once and for all conquer this pithy piece of vulgar literature. She’s seated cross-legged next to the little cairn of rocks; the shallow grave to which she always returns the magazine when her self-revulsion inevitably overpowers her boredom. She keeps the stones arranged such that they can be efficiently replaced; it’s a nice, organized little lie to herself. 

Harrow doesn’t know why she still bothers at this point. Perhaps she just enjoys the routine of stacking and unstacking the rocks. She certainly is nostalgic for the daily motions of her previous life. Not on the Mithraeum, but back on Drearburgh. 

Even in her depopulated and dying house, at least _something_ had happened nearly every day. Harrow had had _tasks_ to complete: giving last rites to an expiring Ninth nun who was already visually indistinguishable from a corpse, or satisfying her self-imposed challenge of getting under Nav’s skin at least once per wake-sleep cycle, or attending multiple daily masses with the other anchorites. Evening mass in particular had been a refuge - this was the service which Pelleamena and Priamhark ostensibly spent in pious prayer at the altar they had erected in their private chambers. It was the one mass during which Harrow could relax her blistering grip on leaden weighted puppet strings of necromancy, and allow herself to be absorbed in the comforting rhythmic movements of her fingers over well-polished rosary beads. Evening mass meant allowing her consciousness to dissolve until Harrowhark Nonagesimus became nothing more than the sounds of knuckle-bone striking knuckle-bone, nothing more than slow breaths and rhythmic clicking echoes bouncing back from cold stone floors and bone-studded ceiling.

She still has her rosary. But piety is different now, here, in this grey never-fully-dark-but-never-fully-lit space that represents her entire lifetime’s worship, here where Harrow now sleeps curled up on the very same bier that once cradled The Body so tenderly in its frigid restraints. The same bier that Gideon must have slept on for the better part of a year while Harrow was politely suffering overly-flavorful beverages because it made God happy, and killing small planets, and conversing with the Body, and claiming asylum in Ianthe Tridentarius’s bed. She had done all this while incognizant of Griddle’s entire existence. 

The Body has not shown her face since that last (mortifying) exchange in Harrow’s bed on the Mithraeum, preceding the arrival of number seven. Harrowhark _Nonagesimus_ as she is now feels this absence differently than Harrow the First had, or than a younger Harrow might have.

Saying her devotions no longer brings solace: the comfort of the ineffable has been ripped from her by a million small simple things. The cruelly mundane ‘John’; months of sleepless nights in terror of sudden violence all with the knowledge that God knew of her persecution and refused to intercede; the horrifying sight of two all-powerful lyctors _kissing God’s neck_ ; the fact that according to a deal she’d been forced into without even knowing the terms, Drearburgh - _home_ \- can never be anything but a memory. The Body, abandoning her to languish alone in the inevitability of her own death. Of all the losses she’s experienced, these last two are the hardest (excepting, of course, the loss of a certain Cavalier). If she thinks about it too much, this black, tidal rage swells, fills her mouth and nose and eyes and threatens to drown her.

**So** in comparison to all that, the third article is a far more palatable agony. It is about cunnilingus. Specifically, it is a step-by-step discussion of methods and best practices. The ‘quick tips’ sidebar paints a demoralizing picture of the empire’s current cultural standards for ‘important’ skillsets; Harrow refuses to be convinced that tying knots in fruit stems with one’s tongue is a valuable use of anyone’s time. 

Harrow’s issue isn’t the discussion of human sexuality, exactly. She is not a child; she knows how reproduction works, she’s considered mechanics in the past plenty in the privacy of her own mind, albeit restrained to primarily clinical framing for her own comfort. The problem is the way the piece revels so _shamelessly_ in the **pleasure** of the act. There is no other purpose, no artifice whatsoever; the focus is entirely on hedonism in the flesh which Harrow… has difficulty processing. As long as she can remember, Harrow has never been much attuned to physical existence. She consistently finds herself neglecting mundane things such as eating for stretches of multiple days at a time; how can she experience libido if she’s unable to maintain a conscious awareness of her own hunger? 

And yet. The article’s prose draws the reader in, inviting them to imagine themself as a participant in the described scenario. Every time Harrow attempts to read it she begins to feel… well, aroused. It’s new and alien and **deeply discomfiting.** Worse yet, the image accompanying the piece features a buxom, muscular redhead with close cropped hair helpfully demonstrating the article’s subject on a waifish blonde with the emaciated build of a necromancer. The visual seems to inflame rather than attenuate Harrow’s reaction to the writing … and she isn’t touching **that** fact with a ten foot pole. The perfidiously alluring text of the article is her real enemy, anyway, always sending her thoughts into a spiral of hypotheticals and imagined scenarios.

Harrow has always preferred to avoid such pointless soporifics as fantasizing and self-pleasure. The few times she’d attempted to touch herself, it had been at once unsatisfying and too intense of a physical sensation, leaving her feeling flayed open and terrifyingly unmoored. 

Growing up, if she for some reason actually needed to anchor herself in her own skin, provoking Griddle’s fists was a much more effective method. Bruises and scabs always had suited Harrow’s nature better, more appropriate adornments for the aberration that she had been since conception. And even moreso after her tenth year of life. Still, Harrow _had_ tried a few times… and had concluded at age fifteen that masturbation was a base diversion suited only to lesser intellects than hers. It made perfect sense that someone like _Nav_ would find it so engrossing, but Harrow had had a million things to accomplish and so little time in which to do so. Sexual self-indulgence would only slow her down. 

Now though, she has no destination to rush toward, no objectives to achieve, not even an enemy to face. She’s reached the end-point, and her only three companions are; the bioluminescent worms, Gideon’s infernal magazine, and her own two hands. So technically four companions. Which, shockingly, feels about the same.

Putting all the (considerable) threat she can muster into her expression, Harrow glares down at the magazine and begins reading again. This time, she commences immediately **after** her usual ‘last straw’ - the paragraph that always sends her careening away from the glossy pages in horror. She’s going to get through this article. She’ll cling to the moments that piss her off and persist through annoyance. There are plenty of vexing bits where the author enjoins the reader to imagine tracing specific letters of the alphabet with their tongue against their partner’s- well Harrow’s going to veer away from imagining that in too much detail. The thing is that often the tongue-letters themselves spell words. Words like ‘TITS’ or ‘DAMN’, which are so frankly cringe-inducing that Harrow thinks it can only be a signature touch of Nav’s subconscious in the magazine’s creation. 

She’s going to become just like Palamedes, isn’t she? Able to either abridge or recite every word of her single-source of literary entertainment on command. At least Sextus’ sordid historical romance had had some veneer of respectability about it - probably because, unlike Gideon, Palamedes has actual shame. Harrow would just _love_ the chance to compare River notes with him, he likely has some truly edifying theories on the different properties of their two bubbles based on anchoring techniques and… well, really, talking to anyone would be nice. She would certainly jump at the chance to mock Griddle’s stupid magazine to her face. Harrow can perfectly picture the outraged exclamation, the snarling defenses of ‘literature’, the way Gideon’s ears flush darker when she’s angry or embarrassed.

Harrow misses the Body with a deep ache (although by now she’s reached such a depth of confounded dissolution that it’s become difficult to determine the precedence of her longing for Griddle’s company versus her longing for her first love). For obvious reasons, everything in this space makes Harrow think of her, starting with the very first thing Harrow sees each time she awakens - those icy, shattered links of chain spilling into the bier. She had thought the Body might return to visit her (Harrow’s? The Body’s? Their) little corner of the River after number Seven had been run off or dispatched, but it appears that’s not in the cards, at least so far. She wonders if the Body _were_ to stop in, would Harrow have anything to contribute to their interaction? Or has her aimless indulgence in Gideon’s pornography rotted and debased her mind so much that she would simply embarrass herself with another clumsy, half-baked sexual advance?

What would she do if the Body… accepted the advance this time? Or reciprocated, even? Harrow licks her lips, absently smooths her fingers across the glossy page of flimsy in her lap. It’s certainly not an… uninteresting idea.

She imagines the Body, gracefully sinking into a crouch before her where she perches awkwardly on the stones. Those long, cold fingers reaching out to touch, the catch and drag of swordswoman’s calluses through the sacramental paint along Harrow’s jaw. In Harrow’s mind, she leans into the caress as the Body’s hand moves down to her neck, lifting Harrow’s chin with a gentle nudge of the thumb. Harrow lets herself be led. She’s grateful for the invitation to drink in that perfect, pallid face - the dark brows, the slightly-off divot in the upper lip, the tinges of blue collecting around the mouth and pooling beneath the eyes. The eyes themselves, occluded with a milky film. Despite this, the Body is undeniably intent. She is unmoving and unbreathing (although the Body never breathes), her golden-hot gaze piercing through corneal clouding like the glint of light refracting off the edge of a sharpened blade.

Harrow may lack experience, but she is secure in her instinct (and the knowledge that this is all her own fantasy) that she is about to be kissed. In this private play she’s directing for herself, unlike that wine-addled moment in the hallway with Ianthe, Harrow does not panic. Instead she welcomes the overture. Her eyelids flutter shut as the Body leans in, and when cold, dry lips brush just slightly against hers, Harrow presses forward, chasing the sensation.

She possesses very little she can draw on to give this moment the verisimilitude Harrow wants, and she finds herself thinking back to the Erebos just after Canaan house, sifting through her memory for any details of the kiss with Ianthe. Of course, at the time, she had been doing everything in her power to _not_ record how it felt. Fortunately, enough of that moment remains; Harrow can extrapolate. She breathes out softly from her nose and tries to relax, backing off a little from her initial stiff lean in, trying to mirror the motion of her partner’s lips. There is a hand on her ribcage, sliding past to brace against the uneven ground behind her. Their mouths part reluctantly, warm breaths still intermingling as the hand on the back of her neck guides Harrow to lie back against the icy stone. There is a thigh (the heel of her own palm) pressing insistently between her legs and Harrow bites her tongue, rocks her pelvis down against the contact, and thinks (embarrassingly) about tracing letters of the alphabet.

The disgruntled shuffle-snap sound of the flimsy magazine sliding out of her lap and hitting the floor intrudes briefly into the fantasy. Against her will, Harrow’s eyes crack reflexively open. She hopes the interruption doesn’t cause her to lose the thread of imagination, and is relieved to find that same warm amber gaze still trained on her - oh. 

It seems her imagination is perfectly capable of sustaining its own agenda, because hovering just above her, warm (nearly scalding in contrast to the Body’s) fingers still curled protectively behind her neck, is Gideon. The eyes are the same - Griddle’s and the Body’s - the observation of which still sends a little twinge of electricity down Harrow’s spine exactly as it has every other time she’s noted that fact.

Aloud, she says “Oh-,” and it sounds loud in the silence, the first actual noise she’s made in how many weeks? Her fantasy of Nav crinkles her eyes, mouth curling into that familiar lopsided smirk.

“Miss me?” says imaginary-Griddle, the upward inflection of the query more of a formality than an actual question. Harrow reaches out for her, desperate. This is her fatal mistake. In an instant, the fantasy is too-obviously fake, Harrow’s actual hands flailing contact-less through thin air. It’s asinine, foolish, unforgivable. Harrow squeezes her eyes shut and mentally grasps for imaginary-Griddle again, praying to she doesn’t know whom (if only there were someone left to pray to whom she hadn’t already **met** and been abandoned by).

But Gideon will not return to her, wavering in her mind’s eye like a mirage, pouring between Harrow’s fingers like smoke.

The shriek of anguished rage that wrenches itself involuntarily from her lungs actually startles her, its sudden brutality shattering the soporific silence of the dim cavern. Her eyes are open again and she rolls to her side, uncaring of the juts of stone that shear cloth and skin at her elbow and hip as she scrambles to her knees.

Her knee slips, strangely frictionless across the rough cavern floor, and Harrow looks down to find she’s accidentally landed on the magazine. The cover is folded back on itself, straining the binding of the flimsy, pages fanned out and crumpled against the stone beneath. She blinks once, twice.

Then she very carefully removes her knee, reaches down with both hands to grip front and back covers, white knuckled. Harrow pulls one hand towards herself, pushes the other away in opposition, staring fixedly as the pages split from one another at the spine. When the binding separates fully, all the force she’s been putting into her arms is loosed, and her pulling hand jolts back towards her, striking her hard in the belly.

Harrow barely notices, nor does she care about the knuckles of her other hand where they’ve been bloodied against the stone before her. Instead, she gets busy decimating the remains of Gideons magazine. It takes her some time to split and tear all of the durable flimsy sheets. She manages it though, digging in with teeth and fingernails and nearby stones. It is not a particularly organized approach but she is fueled by an icy determination to erase every single image, separate every word from each of its brethren.

When the confetti whirlwind of flimsy shreds settles around her, Harrow doesn’t take the time to re-bury it. Why bother, it’s not as though the thing is legible anymore. It isn’t until she painfully rolls her ankle on her stumbling way back down to the moat that Harrow comprehends the reason her vision is so blurry; _she’s been crying, hard_. She considers splashing her face with water to clear off the tears and snot, briefly ponders washing some of the blood out of her destroyed fingernails, but it all seems like pointless effort. There’s no House to lead here, no cloisterites to perceive her discomposure, no enemies to hide her weakness from. Certainly no Gideon to appear strong and unruffled in front of.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus returns to the mausoleum, clambers up onto the bier, and curls herself around the heavy broadsword within. She’s exhausted but for some reason she can’t close her eyes except to blink. She continues staring vaguely at nothing, thinking nothing, ignoring the itch of her own blood and mucus drying on her skin. She doesn’t fall asleep for a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been extremely mega ultra busy yall, apologies for sporadic updates to this series. Don't worry, it's not dead - or   
> I should say; don't worry it's _undead_. Comments appreciated, as always.


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